


Our Torments Become Our Elements

by neuxue



Category: Shades of Magic - V. E. Schwab
Genre: Gen, Holland/Kell if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 01:28:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21839176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neuxue/pseuds/neuxue
Summary: A world in the shape of a man. A man in the shape of a world.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 22
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Our Torments Become Our Elements

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Icefall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icefall/gifts).



A world breathed in, and Holland dreamed.

He dreamed a world, or a world dreamed him, as he sank through darkness into the soft embrace of light, his fraying consciousness flung itself across tangled and infinite threads of possibility and memory and faded existence, across strands of long-dormant power and life, shivering into being once more as threads of a long-dormant future wove at last towards the surface of reality.

He dreamed the dreams of a world stirring towards awakening, and felt life unfurling around him, within him, beyond him, not knowing where he ended and the world began, his last breath fading into this world’s first, and then becoming simply breath.

And in the space between breaths, he dreamed of trees, their roots stirring in softening earth. He dreamed of a river, thawing into life. He dreamed of distant mountains, of the open sea; he dreamed of blue bleeding across a brightening sky.

The world swallowed his death, and he dreamed of life.

 _Antari_.

The word hummed through him in the sound of wind, the rustling of leaves, in footsteps across a market square, in the hesitant beginnings of laughter where for so long there had been fear.

 _Antari_.

It was more than a word as it threaded through his dreams, in whorls of power twining through what once was a void, like the roots that stirred at last in softening earth, as it flowed like blood through his veins, like rivers across the surface of his world, like sunlight or a beating heart.

 _Antari_.

It reached out to him, not a summons or a command, nor even a plea. It reached out to him like an offering, like a benediction, like a friend.

And when he did not reach back but simply let himself drift, it wrapped itself around him in an embrace and carried him gently into waking.

*

Holland opened his eyes, unsure if he was dead or alive, awake or dreaming, world or man, and the first thing he saw was the light.

Sunlight poured down from a brilliant sky and scattered across deep green leaves edged with silver. Holland blinked once, twice, to dispel the illusion but it remained unchanged.

He pushed himself slowly to his feet, his movements smooth and cautious, almost hesitant in constant anticipation of a pain that never came. Standing, he wondered at its absence, and then realised what he was seeing and all thoughts of pain vanished.

Holland stood in the Silver Wood, but where once it had resembled more the cold grey of iron, it shone with true silver, edging the leaves and bark of trees, sending the light cascading down in refracted fragments as a soft breeze stirred the air. It seemed to whisper as it touched Holland’s face, _Antari, Antari_ , and the leaves echoed it in another tone, _Antari, Antari_ , and the sound of the river to which he had once given its blood rippled by and added its voice to the rest, _Antari, Antari_ , like the voice from his dreams.

Straining to listen, searching with all his senses, still wondering if he was alive or dead or something else entirely, he found himself reaching for the place where his power once lay, remembering too late that it was only a void—

—had been only a void. Now the magic responded to his will, uncoiling within him as if it had never been gone, as if that emptiness had been little more than nightmare, gone now like the pain he still half-expected to strike. But he breathed and his magic responded and the wind brushed his face again with that voice he could almost hear, and within the familiarity of magic was something else. Something new. Something strange and bright and warm and somehow utterly familiar.

And vast, far more so than his magic had been before; he had always known the precise shape and limits of his power, and this stretched far beyond or beneath what he had ever known.

And as he touched it, reached with it, he realised he could _feel_ the leaves that scattered the sunlight, could feel the life flowing through the trees, spreading out across their roots. Could feel the stream as if it were a part of him and the stones over which it flowed, flowing to meet the Sijlt, and he could feel that, too, deeper and stronger as it swept through London. He could feel the city, pulsing with life, footsteps across cobblestones as if drumming across his skin, pinpricks of life throughout the city moving like a dance. And further still, past London and out to the sea, the waves and the sand and a distant shore, carrying his awareness across cities and countries he could not even name, and yet through this magic, this strange new awareness, he knew them. Was them. and still the magic unfurled and carried him with it across the world he had dreamed, and he understood.

This awareness within him, this vast power that was like and yet unlike the magic he had known yet was familiar to him as his blood, this power that whispered his name in the voices of leaves and sea, was his world.

The world he had _become_.

He breathed, and the world breathed with him. He reached with this new sense and the earth beneath him and the air around him responded and reached _back_ , whispering and embracing. _Antari, Antari_ , they sang like a chorus. _Welcome home_.

A world sang within him, a world coming alive. A world embraced him, as his own mind expanded to embrace it. A world’s power filled him, and his life flowed into his world. No longer was his magic separated into distinct elements and commands of blood; it simply _was_ , the elements shifting smoothly into each other, river over stone into soil beneath air, and through it all flowed life like blood like magic.

Holland breathed a world, and in the Silver Wood, a silver source of magic, he let it out as laughter, and the world replied in kind.

*

As he tested the depths of this new yet familiar power, Holland remembered a fallen god, but as a contrast rather than a likeness. This was not Osaron; this magic did not overwhelm his being, but instead twined itself in and around who he was, smoothing torn edges and filling emptiness he had all but ceased to notice in the long years of struggle and slavery and torment.

No, this was no spectre of Black London seeking to claim a world not its own. This was him, or part of him, or he was part of it. This was his world, or _he_ was his world, or his world was him.

So many times he had offered himself as sacrifice — his blood spilled into a river to summon a legend, his principles discarded to raise a king, his freedom to survive twin agents of cruelty, his life to destroy a spreading plague, his very self to bring a false veneer of life to his dying world. His pride and power to beg a worldless god, to bind that ruined world and pull it down with him into an ending.

And now, his power and his life and his very self, except it was no sacrifice. Instead, he felt a world awakening within him, as he gave it shape and it gave him back his magic, his heart, his name, his hope. This was neither mastery nor slavery to magic. Instead, it was something he had always thought impossible, yet now seemed inevitable.

Balance.

Holland breathed, and the wind sighed with him. He stood, and tree roots strengthened. He looked down, a flash of red catching his eye, and saw a coin set on a stump amidst new-grown moss, and the world in his mind seemed to sing.

*

Kell’s breath caught as he emerged from below to see the man standing on the deck.

He should have seemed a stranger, should have seemed a threat. He leaned against the rail with the casual comfort of one familiar with the sea, and his hair was white where Kell had always known it charcoal, and even beyond any of that, he was impossible.

Yet there was something utterly familiar about the way he looked out beyond the rail, his head tilted towards the sky. Always he had looked towards the sky, in those stolen moments when he thought no one was looking.

It could not be.

And yet…

‘Holland?’ Kell said, the name hardly more than a whisper. He was not certain, even as the wind curled around the word and carried it forward whether he wanted it to be true or not.

The man turned at the sound of his name, and the eyes that met Kell’s were startling and alive and the left one silver.

Kell stared, frozen, a hundred contrasting impulses warring in him. To call out, to draw a blade, to accept the wrenching pain of calling an element. To reach out, to approach, to embrace the one he had never quite been able to mourn. To search for any sign of possession or deception, half-afraid to see Osaron staring out of those eyes.

Holland — it could not be Holland — it had to be Holland — made no move to approach, no move to speak; merely held Kell’s eyes with that impossible silver gaze and waited.

By that, too, Kell knew him. Holland had always had the patience of a stone, the endurance of a world.

‘Is it you?’ he finally asked, hating himself for the doubt he could not suppress, but he had learned that lesson too harshly and too often to let it go now.

Holland — it _was_ Holland; Kell knew it from the set of his face and the look in his eyes and wondered how he had ever been fooled before — simply nodded. After all, how could he prove it? But as their eyes met, Kell knew he didn’t need to.

‘How?’ he breathed.

Something oddly like a smile crossed Holland’s face, and as it did Kell noticed, for the first time, the other changes in the man. It was not the stain of unnatural youth that had come with Osaron’s rise, nor the pale, bleached fatigue that had come with Osaron’s fall, but something subtler. A subtle shift of colour, an ease in his posture, an absence of agony. _Life_.

‘It turns out,’ Holland said, and his voice at least was unchanged, ‘we _Antari_ are hard to kill.’

*

Knowing he held the other _Antari_ ’s attention, Holland breathed deep, and reached for the power that filled him from a world away, called on that world’s balance with this one, off-kilter though it was. He felt the resonance like a current within that deep well of magic, like a tide, like an ocean. Felt this world rising to his call, as if yearning after even an echo of something it had once known, something too long lost.

He breathed out, and the sea stood still.

*

 _‘There are limits to magic. Yes, Kell, even yours.’_ It was one of the first lessons Tieren had taught him, when he was young and eager and still coming into his power. _‘You cannot claim the sea, nor encompass a mountain, nor hold all the air in your grasp._ ’ It was a lesson he had learned the hard way, like most magicians of any strength who eventually tested the wisdom of their teachers — Lila still challenged that one, he knew. But eventually he had had to accept the Aven Essen’s words as truth.

Now, he watched as Holland held the sea, waves frozen in their cycle, the spray against the sides of the ship turned to glittering diamonds, stilled in midair. As far as the horizon, not a ripple stirred.

It was impossible. Holland was — had been — stronger than he; he could admit as much to himself, at least. But he had known the measure of the man’s strength, had fought against it time and again, had felt it through the binding rings, and he knew even Holland could not hold the sea.

And yet, the ship remained unmoving, the salt spray unfallen, the surface undisturbed by the rising wind.

Holland should have been bleeding, unable to stand, unconscious with the strain of holding such a vast extent of an element, yet he simply held Kell’s gaze with those uncanny mismatched eyes, and for the first time since emerging onto the deck, Kell felt surprise and disbelief give way to a deeper stirring of fear. He was not Osaron, could not be Osaron; Kell was certain he would know, certain he would recognise the inky black signature of that power across a world, much less across the deck of a ship. But the power to hold the sea…

The pain that tore at him as he called his power was not just the soul-rending tearing of his broken magic, but a strange and terrible sorrow, shocking in its strength. He and Holland had never been friends — strained allies at the best of times, and lethal enemies at the worst — but there had been…something…in those last days. An understanding, a shared despair, and an even deeper shared hope.

As he readied his power, the now-familiar agony of it paled against the thought of having to face this man once more as an enemy, to bring a violent end to one he had thought had at last found peace. _You should have stayed in that grove_ , he thought, brutally shoving emotion aside and striking with his wounded magic against Holland’s will and his hold on the sea.

And then his magic met Holland’s and Holland’s will gave way before his, releasing the sea without struggle, but not before Kell felt it and stumbled back in astonishment. He had expected heated steel and ash, the familiar feel of Holland’s magic. He had expected a malignant god, the oppressive weight of Osaron. He had expected some other violent force, had expected, at the least, a fight.

Instead, in that instant that his magic brushed Holland’s, its edges were soft and curling and infinite, its power deep as tides, its scent not ash and ice but cedar and soil and salt. Twice familiar and all the more alien for it, it was unmistakably Holland’s, yet equally unmistakably the essence of White London. And for all that, it was changed. Changed in the way Holland himself was changed: vibrance where once there was absence, life where there once was pain.

Balance, where once there was nothing but the war, of mastery or enslavement.

For an instant, Kell glimpsed understanding, but then the magic faded and the waves resumed their course and it was gone, and he was left gasping on the deck, wracked by the pain of his magic and the shock of Holland’s and the vastness of what he had almost seen.

‘Who…what _are_ you?’ he asked.

‘I am Holland Vosijk,’ Holland said, but where once there had been a defiance in his naming of himself, there was now only surety. ‘And I am the world you call White London. I am _Antari_ , as we are meant to be. As we once were.’

*

There, Holland’s words faltered as he struggled to frame the thoughts and knowledge and memory of a world into coherence.

Kell was staring at him as if he had never known him, as if he still might prove to be another Osaron, as if he were a stranger, as if he were a threat.

And beneath that, there was something else. Holland had felt it when Kell’s magic had brushed his, before he relinquished the sea.

Something Holland recognised all too easily, for he had known it himself all too well. Loss.

Holland reached with his magic and listened or looked or felt with the awareness of a world. It was harder here; this world was not his, was not _him_ , but it knew the touch of a true _Antari_ , and it let him see glimpses.

There was something… _wounded_ in Kell’s magic, a torn edge or a bleeding wound. And even more distant was the wound it echoed, a far older wound in the world itself, half-healed but never-healing, bleeding magic into the void where once there were doorways. A slow death that none in this world had the power to recognise, for it had been too long since an _Antari_ had truly realised their power.

It was the wound of magic seeking magic, a world seeking a soul and a soul seeking a world, and neither knowing how to bridge that gap.

But Holland knew.

Once, he would have mocked Kell’s ignorance, mocked the astonishment on the young _Antari_ ’s face, and hated that this world let him keep it, while Holland’s own forced him, forced them all, to search and scrape for every last scrap of power.

Now, he turned a coin over and over in his fingers, a red _lin_ left in a grove for one Kell must have known was dying. And he remembered, too, an offering given freely long before, of knowledge he already possessed and passage he did not, by one who had not even asked if he had either. A trusting innocence, an earnest offer from one with nothing to fear and everything to give.

A debt he had never repaid.

‘Your magic,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s…’ he searched for the word but left it too long, and saw Kell’s eyes narrow.

‘I don’t need your pity,’ Kell said bitterly.

‘No,’ Holland answered, letting his fingers still, and pressing the coin onto the rail beside him. He saw Kell’s eyes trace the motion, saw that familiar crease form between his brows. ‘But I would offer you my help.’

*

Kell stared at the _lin_ Holland had set on the rail; further proof of an impossibility. That was easier than facing Holland’s words, his offer.

And yet, it _was_ Holland’s offer. Holland was not a man for idle gestures, and for all his secrets and all his masks, Kell knew the other _Antari_ , perhaps better than any, if any could truly claim to know him at all. But Kell knew he did not make empty promises. Knew he meant what he said, impossible though it seemed. And the coin… Kell picked it up from the rail and imagined he could smell White London on it, but in place of ash was soil, and in place of burned metal, rain on clean stone.

He had never known Holland to give thanks easily, if at all, but he read it in the gesture, in a parting gift returned, in an offer extended.

‘How?’ he asked, not certain himself which question he was asking. _How are you here? How can you help? How did you know?_

‘You must heal your world,’ Holland said simply, with a shade of the arrogance Kell remembered, but tempered now. ‘Or let it heal you. As I did mine, and it me.’

‘My world is not…’ _broken. Faded. Bound._

‘Your world is dying as surely as mine was,’ Holland countered. ‘Only more slowly. And neither can truly heal until…’ he trailed off, looking out again to the sea, the sky. Kell followed his gaze and waited, but no more words came.

‘Until?’ he prompted finally, and Holland turned back to him as if surprised to find him there.

‘First, you must become _Antari_ in truth. And for that… I cannot tell you how,’ he said, then paused and took a deep breath, ‘but I will tell you what I know.’

‘Why?’ Kell asked softly.

‘Because my world needs this, too.’ Holland said lightly, but there was something beneath the dismissiveness Kell had grown familiar with. And after a moment, Holland spoke again, so quietly Kell could hardly hear over the sound of wind on sea. ‘And because you showed me kindness, when you had no cause.’

 _You never did understand that, Holland_ , Kell thought but could not bring himself to say. _That kindness needs no cause_. But to one who had endured what Holland had, to one from a world where magic was slave or master and power the same, to one who had been bound body and soul, and broken, one who had seen kindness and mercy in his own death…Kell tried to hide the sympathy from his face, knowing Holland would see it only as pity. Instead, on some inexplicable impulse, he reached out to rest his hand on Holland’s.

For an instant Holland went absolutely still, and Kell almost pulled back, but then the momentary tension vanished once more, and Kell could not help but wonder, at the reflex, how many people had ever touched Holland with anything but violence.

*

Holland almost pulled away at the touch of another hand on his, but forced himself to stillness and eventually back to calm. This was not Alox, or Talya; this was not Astrid or Athos.

This was Kell, who had freed Holland as often as he had fought him. Kell, his would-be executioner, his one-time enemy, his rival, his…friend.

Kell with his surprising kindness and strange mercy, even when they were enemies; a mercy pulled tight over hatred and anger but those were clean, bright things. Nothing like his own jagged edges, the revenge worn smooth after all the years he held it like an anchor. Kell's hands on the sword. Kell's hands on his shackles. Kell's voice in the darkness, trying to offer the sympathy of shared experience. _The king once locked me in that cell._ Holland had mocked him, fought him, tortured him, but still Kell's instinct had been to reach out with what little he had. And he had not mentioned the other shackles, the collar Holland had placed around his neck. Had not claimed revenge, though Holland could still hear the echoes of his screams, the frightened and furious sound of one new to being broken, one still in denial, one still with fire to fight it. A boy in a red coat from a world bright with magic, and some of that brightness still clung to him, when all of Holland's had long since faded. 

Only now they stood reversed, Holland brimming with new, true magic, and Kell’s an open wound, jagged edges at last revealed. Yet even now, Kell offered what he had. Gentleness where Holland had only ever known violence. Friendship, to one he had every reason to have given up for lost long ago.

So Holland did not pull away, and instead the two _Antari_ stood for a long moment at the rail together, staring out across sea and sky, across elements and worlds.

It was a moment that could have lasted seconds or hours, but for all that he wanted to claim this strange new comfort, Holland knew he was stalling, knew Kell was waiting as patiently as he knew how, but he could sense the questions, asked and unasked, filling the air between them. And he owed Kell an answer, both for him and for his world. For both of their worlds.

‘Did you never wonder what began Black London’s plague?’ Holland asked finally, drawing his hands away from the rail and turning to face Kell once more.

Kell frowned, clearly unsure of what to expect, and just as clearly not expecting that, but seeming as unwilling as Holland to disturb this new peace between them. ‘The balance was lost. People craved power, and power consumed them.’

‘A desire for power, yes. But first, there was envy. First, Black London killed their _Antari_.’

Kell’s eyes widened in incredulity mingled with utter confusion. ‘ _Why?_ ’ he finally asked.

‘Because they had power,’ Holland said simply. It was so easy to forget that a world existed in which that knowledge was not instinct, deeper than blood or bone. ‘And because…’ he paused, drawing at last into words the knowledge he had pulled from the memories of a world, from darker memories of a worldless god, from his own power and his childhood dreams of the someday king, ‘ _Antari_ were more than blood magicians, more than just powerful magicians. Once, _Antari_ were worlds.’

‘Worlds?’

‘Not themselves, but… embodiments of their worlds.’

‘That sounds like…’ Kell’s cautious words trailed off, and Holland could hear the name unspoken. _Osaron_.

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head slowly and seeking the words to explain what he was. ‘That was…’ even now, the memory tore at something inside him. _I have endured more than this_ , he told himself, and forced the words out. ‘Osaron saw us—me—as a vessel. Something to possess, to use as a conduit, to control. But _Antari_ …the world shaped the elements, and the sources, and magic. And _Antari_ gave it shape, and senses, and will. I can feel every stone, every gust of wind, every tree in my world. And through me, it can _feel_.’

‘A balance,’ Kell said quietly.

Holland nodded. ‘You were right,’ he said, surprised at how little it cost him to admit that now. ‘My world tried to enslave magic, to bind it to them. But it does not need to be bound, and it cannot be controlled. Nor can we let ourselves be controlled by it. _Antari_ were once a middle ground. Marked, and given power and blood that flowed closer to the heart of their world than most. And some of those realised that potential, and forged a connection to their world, embodying it and letting it embody them, and so there was balance.’

The words came easier, now that he had begun. So long he had held his secrets, he was unused to sharing information so openly, but once, in a childhood long past, he had told stories.

So he told a story now, to the wounded _Antari_ who had helped him save his world. To the boy in the red coat who had given him words and a key.

A story of the fallen _Antari_ , slain by those in a distant London greedy for more power, envious of those who shifted the elements with such seeming ease, whose blood sang to the world’s sources. Those with eyes of black, eyes of silver, eyes of all the shades of magic; eyes of worlds, in those who embodied worlds.

And with the _Antari_ gone, and the truth of their potential lost, that world’s magic was trapped within the world and the elements themselves, without _Antari_ to free it and channel it and be its will. Trapped without balance, without _Antari_ to serve as the borders between humanity and magic, it sought others, and consumed them, for they were not made for this, while young _Antari_ never learned the truth of their power.

The doors closed. The magic was severed. Antari grew rare, magic...stifled.

Black London fell, as the magic burned unchecked, uncontained, through a populace that had destroyed its only outlet, and in doing so brought destruction on themselves.

In White London they marked themselves, binding fleeing magic to their bodies, even as the magic itself sought a body that could hold it and a will that could balance it. Instead they enslaved it and it fled, caught between their bindings and the cold void.

In Red London…

‘Your world held on longer than most,’ Holland said, and the new life that breathed in his world kept the bitterness from his voice. ‘Even without truly realised _Antari_ , you had...balance, to preserve what was there. The magic did not burrow so deep. But still every time you use it, it bleeds.’

He saw Kell try in vain to suppress a wince at his words, and knew then the nature of Kell’s wounded magic. A wound to match the world, indeed. In his own way, Kell already mirrored his world.

‘Why?’ Kell asked. ‘We do not enslave magic, and we do not let it consume us. We revere it. Worship it. Why does it bleed?’

‘Because a world is not meant to be alone.’

For a long moment, Kell was silent, and Holland found that his own story had run its course, the words fallen still like the wind.

For a long moment, their eyes met, blue and black and green and silver, the colours of two worlds that had too long been apart.

‘You mean the doorways,’ Kell finally said, and Holland nodded, expecting protest; it had been this world that had ordered the doorways’ closure, so long ago.

Instead, ‘How?’ was all Kell asked, and in that instant Holland loved him for it.

‘There are points in our worlds that are similar,’ he said. ‘And… _we_ are similar,’ he added, knowing Kell would hear the admission, perhaps the apology in that, for so many years’ denial that they were anything alike. How much pain could have been spared, had he answered that boy differently, all those years ago? Or would they have known friendship in place of truth, never discovering the wounds in their worlds, or the strength to heal them? ‘These places, and us, they are like…’

A smile flickered across Kell's face. ‘Fixed points,’ he said. ‘I thought that once. I thought you might appreciate it.’

‘I don't appreciate anything,’ Holland said on reflex.

‘I thought that, too,’ said Kell, and for an instant both _Antari_ smiled.

‘But first,’ Holland said, hating to shatter that moment of what felt almost like forgiveness, like friendship, yet knowing it was necessary, ‘you must…’

‘Become a world,’ Kell said, the ghost of a wry smile still shading his face. Then abruptly it vanished, replaced by a solemn hesitance. ‘I… will you help me? I think I know how, or what will work if anything will, but it's in Grey London and I’ll need—’ he broke off, and Holland could see him steeling himself, though for the request or what it meant, he could not be sure.

‘I will bring you back,’ Holland said quietly, and held out his hand.

*

Kell remembered little of that journey, and wished he could remember less.

The excruciating travel between worlds — Holland had held the sea to allow them to travel, which meant Kell had had to speak the words and paid the blood price, and the pain tore through him as if the world knew its _Antari_ was leaving, and did not want to relinquish its fragile hold.

The lingering, half-imagined stain of Osaron’s magic as he drew the Inheritor from its hiding place beneath the Five Points, as if the black of the magic were bleeding into his soul. The deluge of memories that came with it, fighting and falling and drowning and breaking.

The agony as his power was torn away, and the terrible absence it left in its wake.

The numbness, the void, the loss, as he travelled back in Holland’s arms to the Setting Sun, as he stumbled through the doors and towards the Isle, towards the source he could no longer feel, could no longer sense.

Now, he drifted. The river held him gently, suspended in its element, in magic, in an embrace he could not quite feel, as the memories flashed past and the hollowness within him ached.

Kell closed his eyes, trying to still his thoughts, trying to feel only the river, and beneath it the source, and beneath it the world entire. Holland had given him little on this part; he wondered how much Holland himself remembered of those last moments.

He drifted, and as his coat grew heavy with water, he felt himself pulled slowly downwards, and tried not to fight as the water closed over his face, tried not to remember drowning. The river, the source, the world.

Distantly, so distantly, he felt the strain in his lungs, but it was nothing to the void within him, an emptiness no air could fill.

Distantly, he felt something like a tide, whispering in his mind, embracing him, offering but not insistent.

And at last, Kell breathed out a void, and breathed in a world.

*

A world away, Holland could sense the moment Kell’s world awakened, like a shifting along a distant axis, an aligning, or a realigning. The anchoring of a fixed point, now a bright flare where once there was emptiness.

A world away, Holland smiled, and made his way back to the Scorched Bone, and laid his palms against the door, and spoke.

*

A world twining its way through his head, and clean, pure magic filling the memory of a void within him, Kell pulled himself from the Isle, marvelling at how he could still _feel_ its every current even as his feet found dry land. And that, too, he could feel, could trace it all throughout Arnes, and farther, to Faro and Vesk and beyond, thrumming with life and magic and welcome. _Antari_ , it breathed, its magic curling around his own, balanced and balancing.

It was as Holland had described, yet no words could have prepared him for this, and for a long while he simply stood and let himself feel this world that had claimed him, embraced him, saved him. Felt, too, the truth of the story Holland had told, graven deep into this world’s past, in the longing and relief with which it greeted him, an _Antari_ realised at last, after so many years of silence.

And even more distant, across the world and across that silence, across that last remaining void, he felt another world reaching.

He moved towards it as if in a dream, drawing closer to that fixed point, feeling the world draw close around him, within him. Waiting, reaching, yearning.

At the door of the Setting Sun, he reached out, laid his hands on the wood, and spoke.

*

_‘As Orense.’_

Open.

*

Across worlds, a wound sealed.

Across worlds, a rift closed.

Across worlds, a door opened, and outstretched hands met outstretched hands, world meeting world again at last.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for giving me the chance to play with this ending! Something about Holland's death never quite made sense for me, so this was a great excuse to see where else that might lead. 
> 
> (Title stolen from Paradise Lost, because... it seemed appropriate)


End file.
